Culture: Taking up his hero's mantle

Jimmy Chisholm spent a lifetime admiring Russell Hunter. Now he is fulfilling his friends dying wish and stepping into his acting shoes, writes Jean West

Jimmy Chisholm still squirms when he thinks about it. The day Russell Hunter’s celebrity landed him in the local newspaper and earned him the ridicule of his schoolmates.

As a good friend of Chisholm’s parents, Hunter was visiting the family in Inverness, where he was a regular at the Empire theatre. A local paper was keen to snap the star with the six Chisholm offspring. Being pictured with Hunter, then a national figure for his role in the 1970s television series Callan, was an exciting prospect for a child.

Except that Jimmy’s mother got wind of the photo opportunity. “In the space of six days she knitted six identical Arran jumpers and Russell sat on the couch with us all around him,” he says, still flushing at the memory. The caption read, “Lonely: but in Inverness he isn’t.”

Since then the smarting schoolboy has disentangled himself from the constraints of